I get so may press releases every day that I can’t tell you what a thrill it is when I get one that bears bona fide important hobby news. Today’s entry from Legendary Auctions bearing the news that the company will be auctioning items from the Bill Mastro Collection was perhaps the best example of a genuinely meaty press release that I’ve seen in a long time.

Touted as a stand-alone event and slated for December of this year, Legendary will sell more than 800 lots from the private collection of the founder and CEO of Legendary’s previous incarnation as Mastro Auctions and later MastroNet.

Speaking of Legendary, there are few individuals in our hobby that can as legitimately claim that status, so the prospect for collectors to be getting a crack at the stuff he collected over the years is likely to be fascinating.

It matters not that it’s all way out of my league, but I’m sure looking forward to see some of the advertising display pieces, which I know from talking with Bill over the years were among the most treasured pieces in his collection. As a guy who was involved in the hobby for more than 50 years, his knowledge about virtually every aspect of collecting is probably without equal, so you know that those 800-plus lots are going to be something extraordinary.

If you want to see a listing of some of the highlights, we’ll have that on the main page of our website, but if you want to get an unprecedented look at the kind of stuff involved – and indeed much of the actual inventory – I’d recommend picking up a copy of Stephen Wong’s extraordinary book, Smithsonian Baseball: Inside the World’s Finest Private Collections. There are more than a dozen pages devoted to the Bill Mastro Collection, including spectacular photography and detailed quotes and even a sidebar story from the man himself.